


Aught That The Silent Would Give

by elebuu



Category: Final Fantasy XIV
Genre: 2.0, Church Sex, Devotion, F/M, Hidden Feelings, Hurt/Comfort, NSFW, lichyard, post-Titan
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-13
Updated: 2017-12-13
Packaged: 2019-02-14 10:30:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 940
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13005852
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elebuu/pseuds/elebuu
Summary: | Yet--when it was this sort of small and subtle transformation in the way she lay her hands on him, where she nocked her elbows when her arms were around him; how close her lips were to the dun fabric of his robe--he was shamefully aware of what he could yet give, if those gestures meant what they seemed they might. |





	Aught That The Silent Would Give

He thought at times that he felt a spark of something go alight in her as she stood pressed against his wide chest, cradled in the embrace of his broad and heavy arms--his only means, he wondered, of offering her shelter. Comfort. Mercy.

Father Iliud had told him explicitly to watch over her, and so willingly, he did; but it did not feel like enough. She sometimes returned from a day’s labours to the sunset emptiness of the church, and became a weeping silhouette offered in crimson-haloed supplication to the glass of the windows, to the idols of the Twelve. And he, Marques, the mute, the speechless one, could summon nothing to say to her. His throat ran dry as he searched for even the softest words he knew in the depths of his lungs. 

And for reasons that eluded him, he found that he would give anything he had to give, to soothe the pain of her loss and her loneliness. Yet--when it was this sort of small and subtle transformation in the way she lay her hands on him, where she nocked her elbows when her arms were around him; how close her lips were to the dun fabric of his robe--he was shamefully aware of what he could yet give, if those gestures meant what they seemed they might. 

He knelt before the altar to the twin faces of the Traders and prayed, his shame offered in sacrifice to the coffers of Thal. 

If she but whispered it to him, he knew he would give her his body. His heart thudded against the bones of his chest as he wandered through this dream he had had over and over again. Willingly would he lift her then, carrying her with the same humbled reverence he carried the mortal to Thal’s soil, to lay her not in the slumber of earth but gently down upon the fibres of his bed. Then and there, she could have whatever she pleased--anything, everything that was his to give, she could take. And worse still, he wished it. Embers he thought long gone inside him glowed to life when she touched him, a fact he hid behind the silence of his fugue, unable to burden her with their spark. That did not stop the dreams unfolding in the back of his mind. 

If she could not be given solace in the spoken word, in the rehabilitation of lichyard work, or the quiet of the Father’s counsel, by the gods, he would give it back to her tenfold in his ministrations; to wash away, for an hour, the ache of her broken heart, with cries of mankind’s lesser mortalities. Marques thought such things far more often than he thought he ought to, but they were lancing and keen urges born of both compassion and inexplicable longing. How he would move with her, with her arranged like a delicate floral offering on the goatskin covers of his bed; to will his eyes in unbroken contact with hers to tell her all he could not find the means to speak. Mesmerised, by the rivers of red hair that pooled over his blanket, over her bouncing breasts, as he rocked her hips, his cock swelling pathetically against the lacing of his breeches. 

She could excoriate the flesh of his back, and all but consume the flesh that faced her, as her body encased him and he wrenched against his selfish hunger to sustain her in this crimson trance. He did not care. She could have all of him, she could drain him dry, bleed him, if it would ever express or approach the comfort he prayed for her to receive. 

He only hoped that in the throes of taking him, she would not see fit to call him by name. He had no name; ‘Marques’ was donated to him with love, from a man whose life no longer had a Marques in it. A fingertip, gentle on her rose petal lips, to implore her not to name him. He was no one, and this could never be lovemaking, much as the deepest and darkest cracks in his spirit wished it would. Marques was a dead man, and dead men could not make love. 

But to allow her every living ilm of his body, from the long mane of white hair on his head, to the contours of his backside, to the pads of his very toes, was a price he wanted to pay even if she forgot him once it was over, and he was no one again. If the sunlight inside her that he had seen when first they met would return, and with her power and joy she ran into the world as fast as her feet could carry her; if there was naught to remember about the silent grave-tender who covered his hair and his fragmented person.

Marques looked up at the idol of the Traders. A severe figure, with its twin faces and its urn and its serpentine lance, it nevertheless felt as if their world of the dead were listening to him, their empty-minded, broken lichkeeper. 

When he stood up to leave, he was stopped by the unexpected presence of the woman he was determined to nurture. She stood in a long, concealing cowl of her own, her head bowed; but she raised her face to him as he turned around. 

Marques did not know what to do once she had stood on her toes to kiss him softly on the cheek, next to the outline of his beard, and laid her hand on his chest for balance. 

**Author's Note:**

> I haven't had a whole lot of stamina for writing my longer fic, Cor Ceruleum, with my current uni semester barreling toward finals week, but this jumped out of the aether while I was compiling the bibliography for one of my term papers and demanded to be written down.


End file.
